I’ve been asked, “Will this handle 1 million requests a day?” by so many devs while I worked as a DevEx Engineer.
Yes, this is an important question, but not when you have double-digit active users, especially when the market for the app you’re building is niche.
In fact, most times I can’t get complete answers when I follow up with:
<ul>
<li>How big is your potential user base?</li>
<li>What’s the projected growth rate of your user base?</li>
<li>How many requests per day per user on average?</li>
<li>What will a 99th percentile power user do with your app?</li>
<li>What do you need to store and how much of that “stuff” (data, images, w/e)</li>
<li>How much to you plan to charge per user? How much does your competitors charge?</li>
<li>… list goes on.</li>
</ul>
My point isn’t that you shouldn’t worry about scale. My point is that when you have no idea if there’s product market fit, you have no go-to-market strategy, and you have no existing customer base or growth, worrying about scale like the same way Google, Meta, Netflix, and the other cool shops aren’t helpful.
Stop worrying about “potential” tech debt if you succeed. If you succeed, you’ll be able to afford to hire people to fix it. If not, the debt is void. Scrap the project and move on.
<a href="https://trunk.io/blog/tech-debt-and-monoliths" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">See this problem discussed in more depth here.
</a>

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Worrying about whether your application can handle massive scaling is premature if you don't yet have product-market fit, a go-to-market strategy, or a significant user base. Focusing on potential tech debt is not helpful at early stages; instead, concentrate on finding and growing your user base first, and deal with scaling issues if and when they arise.

The dreaded "Does this scale?" question

Interviewer: *Asks you how to scale a DB with 1 million users and 10,000 requests per second.
Actual work: *Manages a 10GB DB with 10 users.

Wow thats great, excellent, thank you sir, that really opened another dimension for me! Adios!

Mid-level engineers’ highest concern lol most people don’t think about the complexity-scaling trade-off… Most also believe that only microservices can scale…

Overthinking for Developers. (another title)